A Greenpeace activist dressed in a polar bear suit holds up a sign advocating the Kyoto Protocol near an entrance to the Forbidden City.

Protests and direct actions

Carbon dioxide, the most significant global warming gas, is odourless, invisible, and an easy thing to ignore as our world heats up to dangerous levels. At Greenpeace, it's part of our job to make the invisible impossible to ignore. Often this means going to the source of the problem - hanging a banner on a coal plant's giant smokestack, for example. Other times, it means reminding decision makers they have a higher responsibility than the corporate bottom line.

Always we are guided by the principles of non-violence, and our activists have the best possible gear and safety training. We also aren't above using a little humour to get our point across. But as you read about our protests and direct actions, keep in mind that they all depended on individuals, usually just regular people, who made a personal choice to help save their world - even if it meant dressing up like a polar bear!

The latest updates

It was just past midnight when Indian police hauled two Greenpeace India activists out of their sleep and arrested them this week as a crackdown on protests against a planned coal mine in the Mahan forest intensified.
The arrests...

Greenpeace International, along with WWF International and the Centre for International Environmental Law, sent letters to major insurance firms and 35 fossil fuel and other carbon major companies today, asking whether they believed...

You may not have heard about the Paracels and the Spratlys.
These two island chains, located in the South China Sea, have for years been at the epicentre of a heated controversy between neighbouring countries. Since early May 2014,...

According to new figures released on Monday, last year a whopping US$1747 billion was spent on armies across the world. Modest decreases in spending in austerity hit Western Europe and reduced spending in the US, which is still the...

This week, Beijing’s air pollution is way above safe levels again, the world’s largest coal company has been forced to change its water strategy , and the UN panel looking at options to act against climate change is expected to...

Last year, Greenpeace decided to do something we had never done before during our 13 years of work in China: target and confront a state owned coal company.
And not just any company. The biggest and boldest, a Chinese government...

I bet you read the "news" last week. Climate change impacts are now everywhere and it's going to get much worse if we continue polluting our way into the future.
It's frustrating. It's infuriating. And it makes you want to switch...

I had a birthday on Saturday, but there was no time to celebrate. Instead, I was busy monitoring intensive discussions on climate change in Yokohama, Japan, where climate scientists from around the world were finalising their latest...

In what is expected to be a grim reading, the world's leading climate scientists will give their latest assessment about the dangers of global warming next week.
They will warn us not only what damage the burning of fossil fuels is...